Conventional communication networks allow network devices to exchange messages with one another. A message may be transmitted in the form of multiple packets, each of which includes data and header information. Network devices process the header information in order to route the packets to their destination and to properly reassemble the message.
A network device may receive multiple packets of multiple messages. Multi-threaded processors are currently used by some network devices to process such packets. According to conventional processing, one or more threads of a multi-threaded processor process a first-received packet and one or more threads of the processor then process a next-received packet. This arrangement is intended to ensure that a first packet of a message is processed before a second packet of the message is processed.